Haslett, John 1964(?)-

views updated

Haslett, John 1964(?)-

PERSONAL:

Born c. 1964; married Annie Biggs.

ADDRESSES:

Home—Los Angeles, CA. Agent—James C. Vines, Vines Agency Inc., 648 Broadway, Ste. 901, New York, NY 10012.

CAREER:

Freelance writer and explorer.

WRITINGS:

Voyage of the Manteno: The Education of a Modern-Day Expeditioner, St. Martin's Press (New York, NY), 2006.

SIDELIGHTS:

John Haslett is a writer and adventurer who has spent the majority of his adult life researching and exploring the ancient cultures of pre-Columbian Ecuador. Haslett has built a number of sailing rafts made of balsa wood and based on the designs of the Mantenos, a pre-Columbian civilization that thrived in northern Ecuador in approximately 500 A.D. He has then sailed these rafts on the Pacific Ocean in an attempt to recreate long-distance voyages that were potentially made by the original designers. Haslett's book, Voyage of the Manteno: The Education of a Modern-Day Expeditioner, chronicles his experiences building the rafts, as well as his attempts to sail them, during two separate journeys he made during the 1990s. A Kirkus Reviews critic remarked: "His insights are interesting, though sometimes overly dramatic; one gets the sense he's attempting to make his already impressive journeys even more epic." A reviewer for Publishers Weekly found the author to be "at his best describing his struggles and the superhuman endurance necessary to mount expeditions of this type." Jesse Berrett, writing for the San Francisco Chronicle, commented that "Haslett never opens his tale more widely into any of the areas on which it might touch—ecology, politics, economics; he remains tightly focused on the realities of paying for, staffing and then actually undertaking expeditions."